THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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when it is a question of something so essential to the contract from the start as fulfilment, the anarchist has to add in the same book: ‘The norm according to which the
contract is to be fulfilled shall not rest exclusively on justice (the second axiom), but also on the joint will of the people who are living together. This will shall even
enforce the fulfilment of the contract with violence if necessary’ (p. 293). No axiom had mentioned violence, not even a joint will. But no social utopia can in fact be
founded on the contract, as the centre of bourgeois civil law, without the consequences of the violent society coming to the fore again. Anarchism cancels itself out in
this contradiction; the individual of the free contract — however much of an ideal petit bourgeois he may be — cannot manage without constraint. That which emanates
from the basic legal instrument of a society based on property cannot land up in non­violent associations. An American disciple of Proudhon, the anarchist Josia
Warren, did admittedly confess, still wholly in the spirit of Stirner: ‘Every man should be his own government, his own law, a system within himself!’ But the radical
slogans of freedom ultimately dissolve in the ideal of the family hermit and in the cultural backwater of bourgeois conformism in which he feels at home. The outcome of
Proudhon's utopia would be the all­pervading power of the provinces and hence, since precisely the middle classes are immortalized as the majority, a dictatorship of
mediocrity. The threat of this dictatorship of mediocrity is incidentally to be found everywhere where a democracy is based on broad middle strata of society and
inevitably absorbs their parlour infection, a mixture of resentment and lack of culture. There is then — in the spirit, though not in the letter of Proudhon's work — a kind
of draped communism transplanted into the petit bourgeoisie. Proudhon's anarchy, with its philistine content and the cheapness of the common sense that corresponds
to this content, bears within it in any case a system of bohemian Babbittry and also revolutionary kitsch.
For the fact that this is nevertheless not all that anarchy amounts to and that it appeared as a bogey of the bourgeoisie, for a short time, it has to thank its most vehement
exponent: Michael Bakunin. He did not call upon the centre but upon unruly elements which wish and know how to live precisely in an unsecured way. He kept the fire
in the so­called federations or trade associations, and taught a dangerously empty enthusiasm. The wild woods and the free steppes, together with the life of South
Russian robbers were occasionally incorporated but mostly only rehearsed in it. From Bakunin comes the abstract proposition that the pleasure of destruction is a
creative pleasure, and he applied this ‘dialectics’